What you need to know
- Unity is officially dropping support for GearVR, Google VR, and OpenVR beginning with Unity version 2020.1.
- Valve is working on developing its own XR plugin for Unity, which is scheduled for release before Unity 2020.1 releases.
- This move is not expected to affect consumers in any way, but developers will likely have to report SteamVR/OpenVR bugs to Valve itself instead of Unity.
In a bit of a surprise move, Unity took to its developer blog to announce that it would no longer be officially supporting GearVR, Google VR (Daydream), or OpenVR moving forward. While the first two platforms were expected to happen in the near future, given both platforms have reached end of life (EoL) from their respective companies, Valve's OpenVR, the API that runs SteamVR, is very much unexpected and certainly feels like a strange move from the outset.
But the reality is that Unity has moved toward a new plugin system for XR headsets as a whole, and instead of Unity developing the plugin for OpenVR, its going to have Valve develop the plugin for its own API. That means the onus of official support for developers of Unity projects running on SteamVR-powered hardware will fall to Valve. This implementation isn't going to happen until the next release of Unity (version 2020.1), which is expected sometime later this year and will likely not affect end-users in any meaningful way.
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That means consumers who just spent $1,000 on a Valve Index headset (or any other SteamVR-powered VR HMD) can rest assured that their investment isn't going to be useless going forward, especially considering the popularity of the Unity engine throughout the gaming industry. Developers, too, can rest assured that their current projects aren't going to somehow be nullified by this change in management. In fact, there's a slight chance that something might even be better under Valve's new plugin, given that Valve will be developing a specific Unity implementation on its own platform.
To a lesser degree, this marks the official end of life for the GearVR and Google VR (Daydream) ecosystems. That signal that Daydream would be EoL began when the Pixel 4 launched a few months back and means there's likely no coming back for this particular VR platform. Surprisingly, Google is developing its own Cardboard Open Source XR Plugin for Unity. GearVR has been on its way out for a while, replaced by Oculus Go initially, and now the Oculus Quest for the foreseeable future.
Moving forward, the list of officially supported Unity platforms is as follows:
- ARKit
- ARCore
- Microsoft HoloLens
- Magic Leap
- Oculus
- Windows Mixed Reality
- PlayStation VR
